Bird of the Week!

Bird of the Week: Eastern Towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus)

🐦 Appearance

The Eastern Towhee is a fairly large sparrow with males having a black head, throat, back, and tail; mentioned areas are brown for females; rufous sides and a white belly. Most populations have red eyes, but some have white eyes. They have distinctive white tips on their outer tail feathers that flash when foraging on the ground.

🎶 Song & Call

Usually singing on top of trees or shrubs, their song can be rememberable for some; a song that sounds like drink-your-tea! It can be variable at times, like adding an extra drink.

Their call is a two-parted, rising chewink, tow-hee, or joree, made by both sexes, often as an alarm call. Towhees make several other calls, including a high-pitched, quiet, lisping call for staying in contact, and a sharp tic when mobbing or fleeing predators.

🏡 Habitat & Behavior

Eastern Towhees are characteristic birds of forest edges, overgrown fields and woodlands, and scrubby backyards or thickets. The most important habitat qualities seem to be dense shrub cover with plenty of leaf litter for the towhees to scratch around in. Towhees occur in the Appalachians to about 6,500 feet, but favor warm and dry south-facing slopes more than cool, moist northern faces.

You’ll typically see Eastern Towhees rummaging in the leaf litter or creeping through thick shrubs. Towhees tend to hop wherever they go, often moving deliberately and giving themselves plenty of time to spot food items. They scratch at leaves with a characteristic two-footed backward hop, then dart after anything they’ve uncovered.

🐣 Nesting

Eastern Towhees usually nest on the ground, the nest cup sunk into the fallen leaves up to the level of the rim. In some cases they build their nests in shrubs or grape, honeysuckle, or greenbrier tangles, up to about 4 feet off the ground.

The nest consists of a 4-inch wide outer cup made of bark strips, grapevine bark, twigs, dead leaves, leaf stems, and sometimes string or cardboard. Inside is an inner cup about 2 inches wide and 1.5 inches deep lined with fine, dry grasses, rootlets, and sometimes animal hair. The female does all the building, typically taking up to 5 days to finish.

🌎 Conservation Status

As of 2025, the State of the Birds report lists Eastern Towhee as an Orange Alert Tipping Point species, meaning that it has lost more than 50% of its population in the past 50 years and has shown accelerated declines within the past decade. Numbers of these birds rose in the mid-twentieth century as people stopped farming and their fields grew up. Later, construction of subdivisions and the continued growth of shrublands into forest made the landscape less suitable.